1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for introducing a drop assignment overlap to reduce or eliminate image defects or artifacts in ink jet images.
2. Description of Related Art
Liquid ink printers, which includes both continuous stream type printers and drop-on-demand type printers, such as piezoelectric, acoustic, phase change wax-based or thermal printers, have at least one cartridge from which droplets of ink are ejected or otherwise directed towards a recording medium. Within the cartridge, the ink is contained in a plurality of channels. Power pulses cause the droplets of ink to be expelled as required from print elements provided at the end of the channels. The ink within the channel retracts and separates from the bulging ink to form a droplet moving in a direction away from a print element and towards the recording medium where the drop is deposited to form a dot or spot of ink. The channel then refills by drawing ink from a supply container of the liquid ink.
An input image to the liquid ink printer may include a continuous tone image to be converted to a binary image in such a manner that the printed image preserves the appearance of the tonal gradations in the original image. In the digital reproduction of documents, a bitmap is created which may be described as an electronic image with discrete signals, i.e. pixels, defined by a position and a density. In such a system, density is described as one level in a number of possible states or levels. When more than two levels of density are used in the description of the image, the levels are often called “gray levels”, indicating that the gray levels vary between a maximum and a minimum.